Agile teams are one of the undividable parts of agility. Organizations cannot build a strong structure for success only by updating and training the higher-level management for it. As higher management plays a critical role in any agile organization similarly agile teams play a crucial role along with it by building a strong base for the organization. As quoted, “You can’t build a great building, on a weak foundation”. In an Agility team agile is a base of an organization. To create a strong and highly skilled agile team SAFe has a team and technical agility, as one of the seven competencies.
It defines the important skills, practices, and principles which teams use to make high-quality solutions for customers.
Why Team and Technical Agility?
It consists of teams of agile and agile teams which create support for business solutions delivering value to the customers. The ability of any organization in this digital age depends on the ability of teams of delivering a product that meets the customer's needs. The team and technical agility consist of three dimensions mentioned below:
Agile Teams
An agile team is the first dimension of agility, and also be considered the basic building block of agile development. It is a team of 5-11 individuals who are responsible for managing their work of building, testing, and deploying incremental value within its timebox. It consists of insight as below:
Be collaborative
Ship frequently
Expect and support change
Use measures for progress
Interact with customers regularly
The agile team has two most important functional roles which are Product Owner and Scrum Master. The team members have all the required skills to complete their responsibility.
They are trained to accomplish the common goal. The team topologies of the agile team are:
Platform Team- They are prepared to develop and provide support for a platform that delivers service to other teams.
Enabling Team- Prepared to assist other teams in specialized capabilities by introducing them to new technologies.
Complicated subsystem Team- Prepared around the specialized subsystem team which requires expertise and special skills.
Stream Aligned Team- Prepared around the workflow and they can deliver valued products directly to the customers.
Teams of the agile team
“Alone we can do so little united we can achieve so great”.
Creating a high-level solution requires a broad and more scope of skills which is difficult to achieve by a single team in the given time box. In such cases, multiple agile teams have collaborated in one. In ARTs large set of skills are required as supply chain, security, product marketing, operations, legal finance, support, training, compliance, licensing, distribution, R and D, procurement, product management, supplier, engineering, contracts, and manufacturing, etc. This member forms their team or joins other ones in their team.
In ART main focus is quick execution and value in delivery. To achieve this focus ART aligns with portfolio vision which connects through enterprise strategy. Aligning with a portfolio requires continuous collaboration and communication with stakeholders and business owners.
Built-in-Quality It means delivering quality within the shortest period or within a timeframe. Every type of team in agile requires to maintain and practice their own to improve the quality of their product. Build-in value creation should be integrated into the team to avoid rework and defects other than inspecting later. Some of the quality practices are:
Refactoring
Spike
Test-driven development
Agile testing
Agile Architecture
Behavior-driven development
Some of the other practices to develop quality are:
Establish Flow- It means developing processes from the traditional start-stop-start to the advanced ones. This includes visualizing and limiting WIP, reducing batch size, managing queue length, etc.
Peer review and pairing- It helps to improve quality during development. Peer review provides feedback to other members of WIP before release. Pairing means, two or more team members working on the same product together. Through this, a flow of the proper and advantageous process is developed.
Collective ownership and standards- It means collectively taking responsibility for the valued product. It ensures that anyone on the team can change the artifact for better quality improvement.
Automation- It helps to automate the repetitive process and increase speed ensuring accuracy and consistency.
Definition of Done- It is a standard way to ensure that the deliverable product is only considered done when they achieve the agreed level of completeness and quality.
“Coming together is beginning, Staying together is progress, and working together is a success.”
This approach of teams and technical agility provides long-lived teams that build quality practices throughout the product cycle. Making teams learn together and grow together. About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting, and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium, and large organizations across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients and move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting a human-centric approach to business agility. Embracing change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with an End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitors.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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